The spiritual space of painting should be expanded. Research inquiry in The Archives of Polish and East European Emigration

The Toruń Archives of Polish and East European Emigration at the University Library of the Nicolaus Copernicus University is another institution where we can find traces of ‘artists as truth-seekers’. One of these was the painter Marek Oberländer (1922-1978).

The extensive collection of materials left behind by the artist, donated to the Archives by his wife, Halina Pfeffer-Oberländer, contains a number of interesting documents on his attitude to life and art. One of the initiators of the famous Nationwide Exhibition of Young Art ‘Against War – Against Fascism’ (July – September 1955) – in the second half of the 1950s he was associated with the weekly ‘Po Prostu’ and ran the Exhibition Salon of this magazine. In 1963, he left for France.

Oberländer’s notebooks testify to a struggle with both his own sensibility and identity – the Holocaust survivor felt the need to express borderline experiences, to convey the existential depth of experiences that could not be spoken about in a conventional way. In one of his diaries – adopting the quasi-reminiscence perspective of a Jewish child – he noted: ‘From afar, through an open door, I look into the dark interior of the church. There it is mysterious and there are many pictures. But I’m not allowed to go in there.’

After suffering a serious heart attack in 1964, not only his work but also his reflection seemed to change tone – he was then working on formulating his own theory of art. The deepening experience of introspection – the engaged contemplation of one’s own emotional states, reaching for transcendence – occupied an important place in his work. He was critical of the radical avant-garde, recognising that ‘almost all the painterly theories of the first half of the twentieth century that cut themselves off from tradition in art […] while touching on the spiritual element […] nevertheless became the opposite of what they proclaimed in principle’. However, he appreciated the emotive dimension of abstraction, in the spirit of Kandinsky’s thought stating: ‘Music helps me to concretise the image from the spiritual side’. Consequently, he also rejected formal criteria of evaluation, concluding that a truly complete experience of art eludes verbalisation. ‘What therefore constitutes the indelible value of a painting is the intensity of spiritual force contained in it,’ – he wrote in one of his notes.

*The title of the entry refers to a phrase from one of the Marek Oberländer’s notebooks.